The Research On Don DeLillo’s Work The Names In The Post-Colonialist Context

The Italian American writer Don DeLillo as the postmodernism representative writer, his seventh novel The Names doesn’t gain the wide attention as much as his other works. But there is a significant difference between The Names and the rest of DeLillo’s earlier works. Its background expands to the international stage from America. The Names describes a story that after hearing the homicidal behavior of a local heresy, an employee of American company James was curious about this heresy and kept track them. Meanwhile, this novel also makes a detailed description of the living condition of Americans in Greece and expresses writer’s dissatisfying mood to America and the sympathy for the developing countries.The Names embodies the deep post-colonialist theme and the entire novel shows how America uses their language and culture to control Greece in a post-colonialist method and deprives the Greek of their interests. The developed countries kidnap the developing countries through all kinds of post-colonialist methods and this unfair state relation finally will lead to the extreme tense relation between countries and the hatred between countries grows to an extreme extent. People in the developing countries finally often rise up in resistance, which leads to the tragedy at last. This thesis uses The Names to be the object of the research and conducts the deep research with the help of the post-colonialism theories.This thesis has five parts. The first part introduces the brief information about Don DeLillo and the main content of The Names, and reviews the researches on this novel abroad and at home. The second part mainly introduces the theories of post-colonialism as the theoretical foundation of this thesis. The third part analyzes the phenomena in The Names that the developed countries control the discourse power. Because the developed countries control the discourse power, the developing countries suffer the unfair treatment. The fourth part illustrates the fact that the developed countries use the strong superiority in the culture to dominate the inferior developing countries in discourse power and because the influence of the cultural imperialism, the developing countries are misinterpreted by the international society and the local traditional culture is threaten. The fifth part is the summary part that gives this thesis a conclusion and reiterates the main viewpoints.